7 Convincing Reasons To Have Your Own Backyard Chickens

You can rent the chooks first to see if it's right for you.

If you've ever spent time with happy chickens, you'll know how sweet and bubbly they are. If you haven't, now is the time to get on board.

Keeping your own chickens is easy, fun, requires little time (and space) and reduces food waste at home dramatically.

To get the lowdown on these hungry, little creatures, The Huffington Post Australia spoke to Director of Rentachook, Dave 'Mr Chicken' Ingham.

"The great thing about chickens is they are omnivorous, so any food waste that you've got from the house or the garden will end up getting eaten by them," Ingham told HuffPost Australia.

And by "any food waste" Ingham means EVERYTHING.

I've weighed the food scraps I've given my chickens and it was half a tonne to three-quarters of a tonne a year, which is 10-15 kilos of food per week.

"There's a lot of things you can't compost which go down very well with chickens because they just eat it," he said.

"You could put all fruit and veggie waste in the compost, but composts don't do very well with things like bread, pasta with sauce, curry, cheese, soup, rice dishes and any meat dish with a sauce -- but chickens will wolf all these down. You should see them go for bacon rind, it's all on."

"When I first started doing it, people were saying 'Oh, I'm not sure about chickens, I'm used to cats and dogs. What's this chicken business?' So, the idea was to allow people to give chickens a go and put them in their yard."

If, at the end of the flexible six-week trial period, you don't love having the two or four chooks, or it doesn't work out, that's totally fine.

"You get a six-week period where you can work out if it's right for you and see what it's like to have chickens living in your space," Ingham said.

"At the end of it, if you love it and it's worked out, they're yours. If you don't love it and it doesn't work out, you give them back and we give them to someone else."

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Kids love the company of chickens, and it helps teach them where food really comes from.

The benefits

Aside from substantially reducing your food waste at home, the other benefits of having your own chickens include:

It teaches kids about where food comes from

They help remove weeds from your garden

They turn your compost heap over for you

They're a low maintenance, environmentally sustainable pet

Kids adore them

But the greatest thing about having your own chooks?

"The eggs, without a shadow of a doubt," Ingham said. "They're the best, fresh (and free) free range eggs you've ever tasted. Up to six eggs per chook per week."

If you've ever tried actual country eggs, you'll know these 'homegrown' eggs are incomparable in terms of flavour to supermarket ones.

"It's because your supermarket eggs, by necessity, are being fed a homogenous diet. A backyard hen gets all these food scraps, which results in a broader flavour," Ingham said.

"It's like comparing Tooheys New beer and artisan beer. An artisan beer has all these flavours and characters, and it's different every time."

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Backyard eggs come in different colours and sizes, with the yolks much brighter and richer in hue.

What you need

If you're wondering whether you have the time, space or money to have your own chickens, chances are you do.

"The minimum space two chickens would want is about the area of the shadow underneath a large car. To quantify that, it's about 8-10 square metres," Ingham told HuffPost Australia. "You need to fence off a bit of garden for a hen run.

"It's not a large commitment in space or time. If you're spending more than five minutes a day, you're probably overdoing it. They're very low maintenance.

"To give you an idea, your morning routine would be to come out, say 'hello, ladies' and give them a feed."

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Too cute.

In terms of cost, according to Ingham, having your own chickens is actually cheaper than buying a year's worth of eggs. Seriously.

"Chickens are actually revenue positive -- it's a one year payoff but it costs less to keep the chickens than it does to buy eggs," he told HuffPost Australia.